Over 28 days of testimony, federal prosecutors called witnesses who gave compelling accounts of harrowing violence, acts of intimidation and voyeuristic sex in hotel rooms with oceans of baby oil. Sean Combs, they said, was the ringleader.
Investigators detailed for the jury raids at Mr. Combs’s mansions in Miami Beach and Los Angeles, where they carted away several AR-15-style guns and illicit narcotics. People who worked for Mr. Combs, the music mogul, testified that they had procured drugs for him or had witnessed his physical abuse of a former girlfriend.
In the face of this evidence, the defense presented a case that lasted less than half an hour. Mr. Combs declined to testify, and no other witnesses were called. The rapid turnaround was startling after six weeks of trial.
But in retrospect, the defense’s compact case was a sign that Mr. Combs’s lawyers felt confident the government had not done enough to convince a federal jury that Mr. Combs was, as charged, the boss of a criminal enterprise.
That confidence had appeared to waver on Tuesday afternoon, when eight of Mr. Combs’s lawyers somberly huddled near their client after jurors said they had reached a verdict on all but the racketeering charge. But those same lawyers turned jubilant on Wednesday after the jury declared Mr. Combs not guilty of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy — the two most severe charges against him.
While Mr. Combs’s convictions on two lesser counts of transportation to engage in prostitution could result in his spending years in prison, sex trafficking or racketeering convictions would have carried potential life sentences.
“He fought for his innocence,” Marc Agnifilo, Mr. Combs’s lead lawyer, said in court. “A jury listened to the evidence. The jury acquitted him of the most serious charges.”
Mr. Combs’s acquittal on the weightiest charges has vindicated him in the minds of his supporters, even as it has drawn concern from groups that seek to protect women’s rights. It has also led to questioning of whether the government had been sound in its approach to charge Mr. Combs with being much more than an abusive boyfriend, but a racketeering kingpin.
“The first conclusion I’m going to ask you to reach,” Mr. Agnifilo told the jury of eight men and four women in his closing statement last week, “is that this case is badly, badly exaggerated.”
The racketeering conspiracy statute under which Mr. Combs was charged was designed to combat organized crime syndicates such as the Mafia, though it has been expanded into cases involving sexual offenses, as with R. Kelly and the cult leader Keith Raniere.
Prosecutors sought to prove that Mr. Combs had coerced two women into marathon sexual encounters with male prostitutes, using drugs to keep them awake, threats to keep them compliant and loyal employees to facilitate the logistics.
The defense maintained that the sex sessions were consensual — albeit “kinky” — affairs involving long-term girlfriends, and asserted that Mr. Combs’s entourage of assistants and bodyguards was a far cry from a mob-like criminal conspiracy.
By the time the government rested, the defense had already set out a vast majority of its case by engaging in vigorous and often lengthy cross-examinations of witnesses. Mr. Combs’s lawyers sought to reframe what the government presented as evidence of women cowed into abusive sexual conduct as the more complicated workings of consensual, if unconventional, adult relationships.
It presented dozens, if not hundreds, of text messages sent by his former girlfriends, some of which conveyed enthusiasm, even apparent excitement, for the sex at the center of the case. It deployed seven of its phalanx of nine lawyers to probe inconsistencies in various witnesses’ testimony — at one point undercutting a witness’s timeline so significantly that the judge called it “a real Perry Mason moment.”
And although the prosecution played jurors clips from footage of the sexual encounters known as “freak-offs” and “hotel nights,” the defense showed them a more extensive set — the full impact of which may never be widely known because they were shielded from public view.
The government devoted much of its lengthy case to showing that Mr. Combs had shown a pattern of physical violence, particularly against Casandra Ventura, the star witness. She started dating Mr. Combs as a 21-year-old singer on his record label. He was 37.
During four days on the witness stand, Ms. Ventura testified that Mr. Combs’s violence toward her was so frequent and unpredictable — leaving her with black eyes, swollen lips and bruising — that she was afraid what would happen if she refused his requests for sex with male escorts.
“Make the wrong face and the next thing I knew, I was getting hit in the face,” Ms. Ventura testified.
On this, Mr. Combs’s lawyers took a classic defense strategy: Admit what you can’t deny. “We take full responsibility that there was domestic violence in this case,” Teny Geragos, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, said on the first day of the trial.
But the defense vehemently rejected the idea that the violence was used to compel Ms. Ventura into sex acts.
One episode the government alleged was a clear instance of sex trafficking was at a Los Angeles hotel in 2016, where Mr. Combs was captured on hotel surveillance footage throwing Ms. Ventura to the ground, kicking her and starting to drag her down the hallway. The jury saw footage of the assault repeatedly throughout the trial. Ms. Ventura testified it had been precipitated by her leaving the hotel room after Mr. Combs hit her in the face during a freak-off.
Prosecutors argued that Mr. Combs had been dragging Ms. Ventura back to continue the freak-off. But the defense presented a different narrative of events: that the dispute was simply over a phone, pointing jurors to a section of the surveillance video in which he snatches a phone from her hand.
In questioning the women whom Mr. Combs was accused of sex trafficking — Ms. Ventura and a woman known by the pseudonym “Jane” — the defense largely refrained from being combative. Some questioning even came across as gentle.
“You knew of a version of him that the public didn’t know, right?” Anna Estevao, one of Mr. Combs’s layers, asked Ms. Ventura early in her cross-examination.
Instead, the defense spent hours asking Ms. Ventura and Jane to read aloud their own text messages to Mr. Combs, many of them conveying love or an interest in adventurous sex.
“Baby. I want to FO sooooo bad,” Ms. Ventura wrote to Mr. Combs before the 2016 hotel altercation, using an abbreviation for freak-off. She added the caveat that she did not want to wear herself out before an upcoming movie premiere.
“So let’s do it,” she later wrote to him.
In his closing argument. Mr. Agnifilo was at times sarcastic and mocking as he portrayed the prosecution’s case as government overreach into the private sex lives of adults.
He attacked the government’s theories of kidnapping and arson, criminal allegations within the racketeering conspiracy charge, presenting them as implausible. He portrayed Ms. Ventura as a bold, sexually adventurous woman. (“She is a woman who actually likes sex,” he said. “Good for her.”)
To prove its racketeering conspiracy charge, the government had to persuade jurors that Mr. Combs was part of a criminal enterprise — one that had a structure that continued over time, that had committed crimes and that was not a casual assortment of people who knew one another, but rather a grouping that shared a mission.
The government said members of Mr. Combs’s entourage, whom they called co-conspirators, willingly participated in illegal acts. One aide, the government said, had coached Jane on how to smuggle drugs on a plane. When Jane asked if that was safe, the aide, Kristina Khorram, said, “Sure, I do it all the time.”
Ms. Khorram, who was not charged with wrongdoing and was not called to testify, was also closely involved in arranging the purchase of the security video of the hotel assault.
But Mr. Agnifilo pointed out that those employees also appeared to act to curb Mr. Combs’s aggression, rather than aid it. After the 2016 assault at the hotel, Mr. Combs showed up at Ms. Ventura’s apartment and tried to open her door by hitting it with a hammer, one witness testified. Ms. Ventura said she did not call the police. Instead, she called Ms. Khorram and a Combs security guard known as D-Roc for help.
“I mean if, God forbid, if John Gotti was at your door, would you call Sammy the Bull Gravano to get rid of him?” Mr. Agnifilo asked the jury, referring to a mob boss and an aide once associated with a more traditional form of racketeering enterprise.
Mr. Agnifilo took particular aim at the raids on Mr. Combs’s properties in March 2024, when heavily armed federal agents found and photographed guns and drugs, as well as hundreds of bottles of baby oil and Astroglide-brand lubricant.
“Whew, I feel better already,” said Mr. Agnifilo, who added, “The streets of America are safe from the Astroglide!”
On one matter, the jury certainly did not agree with the defense: that the men invited to hotel rooms by Mr. Combs and his girlfriends were, as his lawyers argued, being paid for their time and for an “experience” — not for sex.
In convicting Mr. Combs on the counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, jurors were convinced that the mogul had arranged for the travel of men he hired to have sex with his girlfriends.
Still, outside the courthouse on Wednesday evening, Mr. Agnifilo was effusive about the jurors who decided the case.
“One thing stands between all of us and a prison, and that is a jury of 12 citizens,” he said. “We had a wonderful jury. They listened to every word, and they got the situation right.”
Anusha Bayya and Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times.
Ben Sisario, a reporter covering music and the music industry, has been writing for The Times for more than 20 years.
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